The
Irascible ProfessorSM

Irreverent
Commentary on the State of Education in America Today

"Civilization
begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos."...
...Will Durant.

Commentary of the Day - May 30, 2010: Civilization As We Know
It.
Guest commentary by Poor Elijah (Peter Berger).

A couple of centuries ago, when the nation was
younger and fewer things ran on batteries, Mark
Twain defined civilization as the "limitless
multiplication of unnecessary necessities." A
few decades earlier Ralph Waldo Emerson identified
the "true test of civilization" as not the census,
nor the size of the cities, nor the crops, but the
kind of man that the country turns out."
Borrowing from Mr. Twain's sentiment, I'm adding
"nor the number of apps on your iPhone" so
twenty-first century Americans can see themselves in
Mr. Emerson’s nineteenth century mirror.

So what kind of man (and woman) are we turning out?

Many people point to public schools as the "we"
behind every ill that currently plagues American
society, from students who aren't "motivated" to
workers who can't compete. Schools are especially on
the hook for everything American children can't,
won't, or don't do, from avoiding conception to
keeping their waistlines trim.

The problem with that line of thinking is that
public schools don't bring children into the world.
It's also not the job of schools to bring them up.
And despite my impressive powers when it comes to
correcting spelling quizzes, I don't set national
economic, military, or social policy.

As a citizen, I'll accept my fair share of the blame
for the state of the union. And, public
education has spent a generation careening between
extremes, heatedly spouting theoretical nonsense.
But my classroom isn't the first cause of the
nation's decline. Schools didn't invent
complacency, entitlement, and self-indulgence.

We mostly reflect what's around us. Then as
schools succumb to the national disease, we help
spread the infection.

There's nothing new about human conflict. It's
been a fact of life since Cain and Abel; and, it's
been a problem at school for almost as long.
Schools, like society, formerly coped with bad
behavior by setting standards and enforcing rules.
Breaking those rules sometimes warranted
conversations or warnings and other times earned
penalties. That's because penalties, and the
threat of penalties, discourage bad behavior.
If you disagree, think back to the last time you saw
a state trooper in your rearview mirror.

Schools weren't the first to make excuses for
antisocial behavior. Nor were they the first
to focus more on the offender's problems than on the
problems he caused others. Teachers didn't
invent the fiction that punishment is always
counterproductive. But many schools and
teachers did adopt that folly. Keeping
students after school is now commonly seen as
repressive. Suspending chronically disruptive
kids allegedly denies them their right to an
education. Troublemakers no longer cause
trouble. They're "behaviorally challenged."

"Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports" is
touted as a "systems-based method for improving
student behavior." At first glance it's hard
to fault a program that calls on students to be
"respectful," "responsible," and "resourceful."
And in the interest of "consistency," it also makes
rhetorical sense to "set school-wide expectations
for student behavior." Claims that PBIS
delivers "reduced office referral rates," as well as
reductions in detentions, suspensions, and dropout
rates induce schools in rocky discipline straits to
"buy in."

According to promoters, PBIS requires "a major shift
in a school's approach to discipline."
Allegedly for the first time, teachers explain and
show students how to behave, a shift that will sound
major only if you've never been a child, a parent,
or a teacher. But PBIS doesn't stop there.
Each academic subject is assigned a particular
behavior. For example, in one PBIS middle
school, the math department, through classroom
lessons and "student and teacher role play," is
responsible for teaching students "how to comport
themselves in the stairwells and the bathrooms."

Did somebody ask why Johnny can’t do math?

PBIS claims to rest on consequences.
Disciplinary incidents earn a warning, following
which the school contacts parents, following which
parents are invited to a conference, following which
there's finally a "discipline referral to the
principal's office."

While all these verbal "consequences" unfold, what
happens to the rest of the kids in the class?
For how many weeks and months, and years, does the
disruptive behavior persist? Boosters boast
that PBIS dramatically cuts detention and suspension
rates. That's easy to do when you stop
detaining and suspending anybody. They also
complain that disruptive kids lose class time when
they're suspended, but far more class time is lost
by everyone else when disruptive kids aren't
suspended.

PBIS's reliance on "rewards" is equally worrisome.
One PBIS school had a tardiness problem.
Students who were chronically late to class had to
"meet with the principal to discuss" it. Those
who didn't respond to the discussion and continued
to arrive late graduated to the next "level of
support," where they received rewards, ranging from
tee shirts to movie tickets, provided they weren't
late more than twenty percent of the time.
Those late students whose on-time rate eventually
reached one hundred percent received free meals at
local restaurants.

In other words kids who broke the rules collected
rewards for breaking them less often, while kids who
didn’t break the rules received nothing.

What moral and practical lesson does this teach?

Another of PBIS’s 7000 subscribing schools was
plagued by "fights, loud disruptions during class,
and faculty being injured during altercations with
students." Their PBIS "intervention" doles out
daily school store vouchers "for small
achievements," as well as "a different incentive"
every month, like free ice cream for kids who don't
earn "discipline slips."

The principal maintains that "this works for a
majority of our kids," by which she means that only
a fifth of her students keep breaking the rules
despite the free dessert. She concedes she's
still seeing "chronic offenders in the office on a
regular basis," which shouldn't really surprise
anybody since most felons who attack teachers and
other children don’t stop because of free ice cream.
School officials then "work with" these "targeted"
offenders to "address the causes of their behavior"
and "come up with individual incentives" more to
their liking.

In short, PBIS bribes offenders, mostly
unsuccessfully, to follow school rules.
Replace "follow school rules" with "obey the law"
and ask yourself if you want to live in a society
where we pay criminals in the hope that they won't
hurt us. At the same time, we're teaching the
rest of the student body, meaning society, that the
reason you should obey the law is you might earn a
treat or a flat screen TV. We're also teaching
them that you're more likely to be rewarded for
being good if you're bad first.

The
Irascible Professor comments: Back in the day when
the IP was in public school, punishments for
persistent miscreants could be far more draconian.
Generally, in the lower grades they consisted of
various forms of public humiliation before one's
peers (standing in the corner of the classroom,
writing "I will not chew gum in class" a few hundred
times on the blackboard, etc.) For persistent
cases, after-school detention was the next remedy
followed by a conversation with the child's parents.
More often than not that would lead to a round of
corporal punishment at home. In the higher
grades punishment most often started with additional
assignments. Repeat offenders often were given
detention as a next step. If that didn't work
the visit to the vice-principal's office usually was
next. The vice-principal generally had two
levels of punishment that he could inflict.
The first was the administration of a certain number
of "swats" with a solid-wood paddle. (This
sometimes was referred to as the "board of
education.") The next level was the
administration of swats with a wooden paddle that
had holes drilled in it. The latter was
considerably more painful according to what I heard
from classmates who experienced this relatively rare
form of punishment. And, when all else failed
suspension and expulsion were used. We
probably had fewer disciplinary problems in the
schools back then. Though it's not clear that
we weren't creating more than a few serial killers
in the process.